With the introduction of new 3D displays, there is an opportunity for 3D video to break through to the mass consumer market. Such 3D displays are able to handle both 3D display and 2D display. Presently, many displaying devices exist that can create a 3D audiovisual experience. These expect different input formats and have different capabilities in terms of resolution, colour depth, frequency, etc.
It is expected that 3D video content is sent from a player devices to a display over standard interface. It is known that 3D video content requires a much higher bandwidth for an interface, hence various transmission methods have been designed that allow sending the additional 3D data without exceeding the limits of existing interface standards. Some of these methods work better with some display types and are not possible with others.
Next to display-type developments, a lot of research has been carried out on developing how to express and describe 3D content, going beyond nowadays mainly two-dimensional content. This resulted in many 3D formats belonging to two main categories: depth-based and stereo or multi-view formats. Each of these categories has further sub-formats, for example the 2D video+depth map may be extended by adding occlusion and transparency information, or stereo+depth may be used as input format. Alternatively the multiple views may be used as input signal and mapped directly onto the display (sub) pixels. A flexible format for 3D video content has been disclosed in 2006/137000-A1 by the same applicant, to be included herein by reference.
Hence there are available several types of display devices, each with its own 3D display abilities, and several methods of transmitting 3D information from a playback device to a display device, and several possible formats for compressing 3D information, many of these incompatible with each other.
The available of many 3D devices and 3D formats that are incompatible with each other (in other word the lack of a unified standard) may make 3D displays and 3D players less attractive to a consumer and risk to lead to limited market acceptance.